Hi, I recommended this before, I know, but a very good start to understand what is under the hood and how the whole thing is working in general is a book by Jeffrey Richter: MS .NET programing! It explains bits about C# and uses C# as the example code language AND provides you with a very good understanding about how all the internals (garbage collection, JIT compiler etc. works). Good luck!

There are some other nice ones: 'Imperfect C++' by some australian guy 'modern C++ design' by Andrei Alexandrescu '.NET framework programming' by jeffrey richter 'Design patterns' by the gang of four (google for GOF) and the list goes on and on... -- modified at 6:24 Friday 2nd June, 2006

That's right, but current applications that run in the managed environment don't use the full potential of the underlying concepts, because the current runtime compilers require a lot of additional work e.g. to take advantage of a detected dual code system and so on. Therefore at the moment managed code runs slower then unmanaged code because of garbage collection (even this is veeery fast already) and other stuff. C# offers a lot of features I was always missing in C++ (e.g. delegates and properties) but direct memory manipulation is still needed in high performance applications and this is a bit stressful to do in C# at the moment. Again: I think .NET offers a great potential for the future and what we have currently is just the beginning, but C++ will die(if it's dying at all) very, very slowly.

I think this question is NOT about what field you are interessted in, as I am convinced the future is .NET. Managed code will run faster then native code in a couple of years just because the JIT can apply the perfect optimisations to the application when it is started. I am also coming from unmanaged C++ an love it. But everybody who has read a couple of books about the .NET idea and the underlying basic concepts has to admit, that the idea is perfect and will pay of in the end. But I also agree, that currently managed applications might not be the first choise for high end computer games. But in a couple of years this answer may no longer be correct.

I used InstallShield a couple of years ago but always had trouble with files not being removed from the system32 dir etc. and I was always missing certain stuff I needed for my installations (launch an exe, call a dll, conditional installs (if reg key exists do something etc.)) and since then once a year i download an eval version of install shield express and still find that not all the files are removed on uninstall. However now I am building everything using the free Wix-toolkit (http://sourceforge.net/projects/wix) which I think is perfect, as it's giving you full control even when it's a bit hard to understand in the beginning. There is a good tutorial to understand the basics (http://www.tramontana.co.hu/wix/) and for complicated stuff you can even decompile e.g. the Microsoft office setup and have a look on how they did it.